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Western firms plan to cash in on Syria’s oil and gas ‘frontier’
US, British, French, Israeli and other energy interests could be prime beneficiaries of military operations in Iraq and Syria designed to rollback the power of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) and, potentially, the Bashar al-Assad regime.
A study for a global oil services company backed by the French government and linked to Britain’s Tory-led administration, published during the height of the Arab Spring, hailed the significant “hydrocarbon potential” of Syria’s offshore resources.
The 2011 study was printed in GeoArabia, a petroleum industry journal published by a Bahrain-based consultancy, GulfPetroLink, which is sponsored by some of the world’s biggest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Shell, Total, and BP.
GeoArabia’s content has no open subscription system and is exclusively distributed to transnational energy corporations, corporate sponsors and related organisations, as well as some universities.
Authored by Steven A. Bowman, a Senior Geoscientist for the French energy company CGGVeritas, the study identified “three sedimentary basins, Levantine, Cyprus, and Latakia, located in offshore Syria” and highlighted “significant evidence for a working petroleum system in offshore Syria with numerous onshore oil and gas shows, DHIs (direct hydrocarbon indicators) observed on seismic, and oil seeps identified from satellite imagery.”
France’s secret affair with Assad’s Syria
At the time, when civil unrest was sweeping across Syria, CGGVeritas was contracted to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Sources.
The French company is one of the world’s largest seismic surveyors. Backed by the French government which owns 18% voting rights in the firm, CGGVeritas had acquired seismic data on offshore Syrian resources in 2005, and since then has been the main point of contact for geophysical and geological datasets on behalf of the Syrian regime.
NATO is harbouring the Islamic State
NATO is harbouring the Islamic State
Why France’s brave new war on ISIS is a sick joke, and an insult to the victims of the Paris attacks
“We stand alongside Turkey in its efforts in protecting its national security and fighting against terrorism. France and Turkey are on the same side within the framework of the international coalition against the terrorist group ISIS.”
Statement by French Foreign Ministry, July 2015
The 13th November Paris massacre will be remembered, like 9/11, as a defining moment in world history.
The murder of 129 people, the injury of 352 more, by ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) acolytes striking multiple targets simultaneously in the heart of Europe, mark a major sea-change in the terror threat.
For the first time, a Mumbai-style attack has occurred on Western soil — the worst attack on Europe in decades. As such, it has triggered a seemingly commensurate response from France: the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1961 Algerian war.
ISIS has followed up with threats to attack Washington and New York City.
Meanwhile, President Hollande wants European Union leaders to suspend the Schengen Agreement on open borders to allow dramatic restrictions on freedom of movement across Europe. He also demands the EU-wide adoption of the Passenger Name Records (PNR) system allowing intelligence services to meticulously track the travel patterns of Europeans, along with an extension of the state of emergency to at least three months.
Under the extension, French police can now block any website, put people under house arrest without trial, search homes without a warrant, and prevent suspects from meeting others deemed a threat.
“We know that more attacks are being prepared, not just against France but also against other European countries,” said the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We are going to live with this terrorist threat for a long time.”
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Ex-World Bank chief economist exposes “failure” of austerity, deregulation
Ex-World Bank chief economist exposes “failure” of austerity, deregulation
Joseph Stiglitz, a senior OECD expert, slams OECD’s own policies to prevent global slowdown
In a little-known speech at the United Nations University, renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz criticised Western approaches to addressing the global economic crisis for being obsessed with market solutions that cannot work.
His remarks were made just two months before the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued its latest forecast of a “deeply concerning” slowdown in global trade, which the group says has dropped perilously close to levels “associated with global recession.”
The OECD’s chief economist, Catherine Mann, said that: “Policy actions are already being implemented that will help to address the weak underlying trends.”
Professor Stiglitz of Columbia University, who chairs the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (HLEG) at the OECD, contradicted this reassuring promise in his UN University address in September.
Describing standard neoclassical and behavioural models of economics as “wrong” on the basis of new advances in economic research, Stiglitz blamed ongoing economic stagnation on the so-called “Washington Consensus” — a set of neoliberal policies advocated most strongly by the US and Britain.
The Washington Consensus (WC) consists of a string of interlinked policies requiring reductions in public spending; rampant deregulation to reduce restrictions on banks, corporations and other financial actors; extensive privatisation of social and public services; and liberalisation based on reducing taxes, tariffs and non-tarrif barriers to trade.
All this is believed to drive growth and enhance the distribution of wealth.
In reality, as Stiglitz told an audience at the UN University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, it has done the opposite.
Thirty years ago, he said, “the focus was on limiting the role of the government — getting it out of the way…
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The Syrian terror trap
The Syrian terror trap
The US, Russia and Iran are fracturing the Levant
Leaked US diplomatic cables show that the US sought to undermine the Assad regime nearly a decade ago. But that’s not the whole story. In 2011, as peaceful protestors rallied across Syria, Assad was courted by the Obama administration as a potential client and regional partner. Only because the US eventually abandoned him, did he revert fully to the trappings of Russian and Iranian power. Yet in supporting Assad’s state-terrorism in the name of fighting terror, the new Russia-Iran military axis in Syria is falling into a trap of its own making. Rather than constituting a new ‘anti-imperialist’ front, the Russia-Iran alliance could see the conflict escalate into a protracted regional, sectarian war of attrition culminating in the permanent dismemberment of Syria.
Russia’s invasion of Syria has provoked excitement amongst some antiwar activists, who see Putin’s macho muscle-flexing in the Middle East as a welcome geopolitical check on American hegemony.
But just because the United States is — as Boston University historian and military veteran Professor Andrew Bacevich has shown — the world’s pre-eminent imperial superpower, that doesn’t make angels out of its rivals.
Russia Today (RT) and Press TV (Iran’s satellite news channel) would have us believe that Russia and Iran are waging a Good ‘war on terror’ in Syria.
In reality, both Russia and Iran are, like the US, neo-imperial state structures engaging in geopolitical expansionism.
Without an ounce of shame, the Russians and Iranians have eagerly co-opted the language of the US-led ‘war on terror’ to justify their own imperial violence in Syria.
It is not the ‘war on terror’ they oppose, but merely US encroachment on their regional interests.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Secret files: British government courting Arab tyrants, fossil fuel interests
Secret files: British government courting Arab tyrants, fossil fuel interests
Official documents show how oil and business interests trump democracy
A range of official government documents released under Freedom of Information (FOI) expose how the British government is valiantly promoting democracy in the Middle East: by courting the region’s most vociferous opponents of democracy.
The approach reflects the consistent focus of Britain’s strategy in the region on promoting “stability” through energy investments and arms sales with authoritarian regimes and outright dictatorships.
Responding to an FOI request in February, the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) Middle East and North Africa Directorate provided a list of meetings hosted by other governments or companies attended by Edward Oaken, then the FCO’s Director for the Middle East.
According to the list, Oakden was hosted fifty-nine times during a period of just over a year, almost entirely by autocratic Arab regimes, fossil fuel companies, and corporate interests.
Oakden was FCO Middle East director from 2013 to 2015 before being appointed British Ambassador to Jordan in February,
From 18th September 2013 to 14th January 2015, Oakden had a total of 26 “hospitality” meetings with representatives of serial human rights abusers — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Oman and Morocco — and a further 15 with business groups, investors, and oil companies.
The rest were largely routine meetings with British and European political leaders.
The FCO conceded that the list of meetings provided was not exhaustive.
Blood for oil for cash
The Foreign Office meetings included three receptions hosted by British Petroleum (BP), including a “high level dinner” to discuss “global energy challenges”; a Genel Energy annual reception; and a lunch meeting with Centrica Energy “on business prospects in the Middle East.”
British firms BP and Genel are heavily invested in Iraq. BP is involved in the giant Rumailah oil field and the huge northern Kirkuk field in the Kurdish region, while Genel is invested primarily in Iraqi Kurdish fields of Taq Taq and Tawke.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders
UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders
Why the new Sustainable Development agenda is “fundamentally compromised” by corporate interests
UN records reveal that the intergovernmental body has already marginalised the very groups it claims to be rescuing from poverty, hunger and climate disaster.
At the end of this month, the UN will launch its new 2030 Sustainable Development agenda for “people, planet and prosperity” in New York, where it will be formally adopted by over 150 world leaders.
The culmination of years of consultations between governments, communities and businesses all over the world, there is no doubt that the agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an unprecedented vision of the interdependence of global social, economic and environmental issues.
But records from the SDG process reveal that insiders at the heart of the UN’s intergovernment engagement negotiations have criticised the international body for pandering to the interests of big business and ignoring recommendations from grassroots stakeholders representing the world’s poor.
Formal statements issued earlier this year as part of the UN’s Post-2015 Intergovernmental Negotiations on the SDGs, and published by the UN Sustainable Development Division, show that UN ‘Major Groups’ representing indigenous people, civil society, workers, young people and women remain deeply concerned by the general direction of the SDG process — whereas corporate interests from the rich, industrialised world have viewed the process favourably.
Big business
Among the ‘Major Groups’ engaged in the UN’s SDG process is ‘Business and Industry.’ Members of this group include fossil fuel companies like Statoil USA and Tullow Oil, multinational auto parts manufacturer Bridgestone Corporation, global power management firm Eaton Corporation, agribusiness conglomerate Monsanto, insurance giant Thamesbank, financial services major Bank of America, and hundreds of others from Coca Cola to Walt Disney to Dow Chemical.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An Open Letter to Britain’s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron
An Open Letter to Britain’s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron
Dear Prime Minister David Cameron,
It is with deep disappointment that I read excerpts of your speech provided by Downing Street to the press, purporting to set out a five-year strategy to tackle fundamentalist terrorism, which — whatever its intentions — is thoroughly misguided, and destined to plunge this country, as well as the Middle East, into further chaos and misery.
I am writing this open letter to request you, as a matter of urgency, to abide by your obligations as a human being, a British citizen, a Member of Parliament, and as our Prime Minister: to undertake proper due-diligence in the formulation of Britain’s foreign, counter-terrorism and security policies, based on the vast array of evidence from scientific and academic studies of foreign policy, terrorism and radicalisation, rather than the influence of far-right extremist ideology, and of narrow vested interest groups keen to profit from war and fear.
Ideology, innit
In your speech, you say:
“It begins by understanding the threat we face and why we face it. What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm. And it often backs violence to achieve this aim….
And like so many ideologies that have existed before — whether fascist or communist — many people, especially young people, are being drawn to it.
We need to understand why it is proving so attractive… The root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself.”
But this is already incoherent. You state that the threat is Islamist extremism, an ideology. You then claim that we need to understand why that ideology is so attractive, and you answer the question by claiming that the “root cause” of this threat is the “extremist ideology itself.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
George Monbiot and the Iraq War bullshit brigade
George Monbiot and the Iraq War bullshit brigade
Why the ‘liberal’ defence of the Iraq Body Count falls flat on its face
There has been a response to my investigation into Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the people behind it — and longstanding Guardian columnist George Monbiot himself has popped out of the woodwork to give it his official thumbs-up.
The article in question is my INSURGE intelligence piece, “How the Pentagon is hiding the dead,” which critically examines the claims of IBC and IBC-affiliated scholars about the death tolls in Iraq, as well as in other conflicts, mainly Afghanistan and Colombia.
Monbiot, a journalist for whom I have much respect, couldn’t bring himself to say a word in public after news of how my contract was unilaterally terminated by The Guardian for writing on my environment blog about the role of Gaza’s gas in motivating Israel’s military offensives.
But an attack on my critique of Iraq Body Count was enough to break the silence.
My investigation into Iraq Body Count, Monbiot trumpeted on Twitter, is “pernicious bullshit,” which has received a “devastating take-down” by Brian Dean, who runs a blog called ‘News Frames’ and who has apparently been a vocal supporter of Iraq Body Count for many years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
